Dronica #76 - Dronica Meets Lou Barnell

Nicola Serra, founder of East London's experimental music festival Dronica, presents new and archival material.

In this episode, Dronica meets Lou Barnell.

Lou is an award-winning vocalist, sound and performance artist. She is one of Sound and Music's New Voices 2022 Composers, and Manchester Jazz Festival Hothouse Residents 2023. She was winner of the 2021 Oram Awards, supported by The PRS Foundation and BBC Radiophonic Institute in recognition of innovation in sound and technology.

Lou’s work gives language to her alienating and disorientating experiences of being a neurodivergent woman. It communicates her synaesthetic experience of sound, hyperfocus and sensory overload.

This show is dedicated to Lou's Practice and the focus of her practice led PhD called Live Dreaming. This concept reconsiders her body as a mirror, reflecting and refracting parallel states of dreaming and performance. She emulates this duality in her work by creating scores and live performances with sculpted, shapeshifting, re-useable materials such as ice and thermoplastic. She uses wearable sensors and biorhythmic data to play and score music.

"As a woman growing up with a learning difficulty, the way I experience the world does not align with the way the world experiences me. To make sense of unfathomable surroundings, I use my voice as a material. My voice can be a compass, or a totem, it can be sculpted, broken and reformed.

It is the core of all of my music and production. I use wearable instruments and sculptures to contain, shape and release my body and voice. My aim is to become more than myself, to possess ways of communicating and receiving sound that are true to how I experience my surroundings."